Genre painting
[2] Medieval illuminated manuscripts often illustrated scenes of everyday peasant life, especially in the Labours of the Months in the calendar section of books of hours, most famously the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.
These were part of a pattern of "Mannerist inversion" in Antwerp painting, giving "low" elements previously in the decorative background of images prominent emphasis.
In the second half of the 16th century, Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer painted in Antwerp works showing in the foreground cooks or market-sellers amidst a bountiful spread of vegetables, fruit and/or meat, with small religious scenes in spaces in the background.
The apparent 'realism' of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art gives the viewer the initial impression that the artist solely intends to depict scenes of common life in a realistic way.
The suggestive pose of the rooster's head and the fact that the Dutch word for 'birds' (vogelen) was also a vulgar term for sexual intercourse indicated that the artist also included a scabrous meaning in his painting.
A number of Flemish and Dutch and later also Italian painters, who painted genre scenes of the Roman countryside inspired by van Laer's works were subsequently referred to as the Bamboccianti.
[7] Other Bamboccianti include Michiel Sweerts, Thomas Wijck, Dirck Helmbreker, Jan Asselyn, Anton Goubau, Willem Reuter, and Jacob van Staverden.
Realists such as Gustave Courbet (1819–77) upset expectations by depicting everyday scenes in large canvases of a scale traditionally reserved for "important" subjects.
This trend, already apparent by 1817 when Ingres painted Henri IV Playing with His Children, culminated in the pompier art of French academicians such as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–91).
Other 19th-century English genre painters include Augustus Leopold Egg, Frederick Daniel Hardy, George Elgar Hicks, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.
Subsequently, the Impressionists, as well as such 20th-century artists as Pierre Bonnard, Itshak Holtz, Edward Hopper, and David Park painted scenes of daily life.
Examples of artists working in this retro style include Ferdinand de Braekeleer, Willem Linnig the Elder and Jan August Hendrik Leys.
He was influenced, at least initially, by English artists such as William Hogarth and Scottish painters such as David Wilkie and produced lively and gently humorous scenes of life in Philadelphia from 1812 to 1821.
[11] Other notable 19th-century genre painters from the United States include George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount, and Eastman Johnson.
Harry Roseland focused on scenes of poor African Americans in the post-American Civil War South, and John Rogers (1829–1904) was a sculptor whose small genre works, mass-produced in cast plaster, were immensely popular in America.
